The information asymmetry of Mimblewimble.

Chris Dev

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June 28, 2019

When I first heard about Bitcoin, I thought it wouldn't work. I thought, why would people get the idea that they could make their own online money?  Later when I heard that Mark Andreesen, the Netscape founder was investing in Bitcoin, I realized that I needed to look more into it. That was late 2013. I missed the majority of the 2013 bubble and didn't start significantly investing until 2014, but then I basically went all in. That was after doing some very serious research. I had a moment like Andreas Antonopolis describes where he just got it and all he could do is watch videos, read stories and post on reddit about Bitcoin. To this day I haven't sold any Bitcoin and I don't plan to anytime soon. In 2014, when I started telling my family and friends about Bitcoin, they thought I was crazy and some people thought I was part of some MLM organization or something. It wasn't until late 2017, that I started to get a bunch of calls from people asking about cryptocurrency. Unfortunately, most friends and family wanted to know about Ripple and Ethereum. I assume many of the people reading this, have had a similar experience.

Fast forward to late 2018 when I started to really try to understand Mimblewimble, I had a similar kind of moment where I was completely consumed by Mimblewimble. I had read the white paper in 2016, but the main thing I struggled with back then was, how it would be incorporated into Bitcoin. I think that's what most people are struggling with today. But eventually, I realized that the only way that Bitcoin can fully benefit from Mimblewible is if it were to be implemented in the base layer and that one day, all Bitcoiners would have to choose how to value each side of a hard fork that splits Bitcoin classic from Bitcoin Mimblewimble. It's coming and I don't see that there's anything that can be done to prevent it. If you don't like that and don't want controversy, sorry don't kill the messenger though. By the way, controversy is what causes Bitcoin's price to go up, it's anti-fragile after all. Just look at how much the price of Bitcoin rose during the block size debate. Will this split be another BCH moment where sophisticated Bitcoin holders, split and dump their forked coin for profits? Since that's happened before, many Bitcoiners think that's what happens with every fork, but I don't think it's that simple.

Since many people are new in the space and either weren't here when BCH was created or were not plugged in at the time and there's a lot of revisionist history going around about what it was or is, let me briefly recap. First of all, BCH was created by a mining pool called VIABTC, not Roger Ver, not Jihan Wu, not Faketoshi. Some people say it's a company that is controlled by Jihan, but as far as I know no one really knows. Roger Ver seemed to be more in support of Segwit 2X until that ultimately failed, then he got fully behind VIA BTC well after launch. The fork occurred on the same block that Segwit was to activate on the mainnet of Bitcoin and since VIA BTC was vehemently opposed to Segwit, clearly it did not include Segwit. It included a block size increase to 8 mb instead and it also eventually rolled back replace by fee (RBF, which is basically mandatory unless you never have full blocks). But amazingly, BCH which has a fairly big following and is the number four altcoin in market cap was announced a few weeks before it was forked by a mining pool which had formed less than a year earlier and had absolutely no core developers supporting it. That's the true origin of BCH. Now, compare and contrast that to what I am talking about with a potential future Mimblewimble hard fork.

The developer community, pretty much unanimously panned the idea of BCH and for good reason because it had no developer support, it was an irrational reaction to an upgrade that some entrenched mining interests didn't understand. Mimblewimble, on the other hand was introduced as an academic style research paper that inspired some of the top developers from the beginning and was revised by one of the top thinkers in the space - Andrew Polestra of Blockstream. After nearly three years of refinement testnets were launched which will soon include MWC and after years of testing, a well written BIP will surely be submitted for incorporation into Bitcoin core. That BIP will be very controversial at first, but over time, the community will come to accept the idea. It will help greatly that multiple Mimblewimble based chains will have ran for years without problems. There will be people who hold out forever which will likely mean a chain split, but I am sure the vast majority of the monetary value would go to the Mimblewimble side of the fork in such a scenario.

So if almost everyone is against this idea right now: See Adam Meister's this week in Bitcoin show where all panelists agreed that privacy should be done on layer 2, not layer 1, how or why will everyone change their mind? I expect initial support for the idea to come from the developer community. Many of the non-technical community will be shocked to see this as they basically think the developers are completely afraid of any change to Bitcoin. The other driver will be an absolutely massive outperformance over a long period of time (5 - 10 years) by the Mimblewimble based coins with respect to Bitcoin itself. This will cause people to understand the significance of Mimblewimble as it will start to threaten their pocketbook as BTC holders when Mimblewimble coins take up a 1% marketshare, 2%, 5%, 10%, 20% and maybe even more. Then a reaction will be imminent. That's how I see it all playing out. I've been over it time and time again in my mind and I just don't see it any other way

As has been the trend in the last few articles, I only get to the title of the article at the end and this article will be no different. They say the only way you can make money in a market is by having knowledge that others don't have. This is known as information asymmetry. If you know something that others don't know then you will make money. If you only know something that everyone already knows you won't make money. This is something that is really clear with Bitcoin. Those that were able to discern the information about why Bitcoin has value earlier than others made money. Those that didn't did not: See Peter Schiff. Mimblewimble is another one of those situations. The math behind Mimblewimble is hard to understand and many people are still struggling with understanding Bitcoin itself. There are really very few people that are capable of comprehending it at this point and before there are easy to use wallets that demonstrate it's benefits most people won't be able to appreciate it. That means if you understand this information you have information asymmetry. Congratulations!

So, in response to what I see clearly, I decided to create MWC not just so that I make money off what I see is the biggest opportunity in crypto at the moment, but also so that Bitcoin holders who see what I see and register for this free airdrop can  benefit as well. Registration is open until July 19. 2019 and you can register by clicking on the airdrop link at the top of the page.